Couples Who Watch TV Together, Stay Together

Trending News: The Surprising Indicator That Your Relationship Will Last

Why Is This Important?

Because leaving the couch to go have sex means you might miss out on essential plot points.

Long Story Short

Recent research indicates that, far from being a cipher of impending doom, watching TV and movies together can in fact enhance what you’ve already got.

Long Story

If winter is coming and it’s headed directly for your relationship, a new study has found that watching it approach together just might be the way to stay warm. Ed Sheeran very much aside (the fuck was that?), Game of Thrones still rules no matter what anyone aggressively tweets about season seven - and now for even more reasons than titties and titties. Far from putting an Axe of Couchbound Unexcitement in your quality time, sharing immersion in it and TV shows like it with your significant other has been shown to improve togetherness under the right circumstances.

“Humans have created shared social experiences through narrative and performance long before the advent of modern media,” stated lead study author and psychologist, Sarah Gomillion. “Our findings support the growing evidence that like other forms of narrative, contemporary media benefits people by providing a rich, psychologically meaningful social world.”

The research team focused on 259 students, all in committed monogamous relationships. They were routinely asked about things like the ‘quality’ of their partnership, whether their social circles overlapped and their ‘media habits’. While that first query seems a little nebulous and odd, the other two steadily came together to make it make sense: The couples that shared more friends were generally happier, and the couples that said they regularly watched movies and TV together were also much happier. The latter is somewhat surprising, given that bed-death and the inevitable break-up often bookend lengthy nights of silence in front of the big screen.

A follow-up study in the same vein looked at 128 more students in the same romantic situation. This time, they were asked to talk about how motivated they were to ‘share media’ with their partner, and were than asked to somehow quantify the goodness of their relationship. As if in answer to any cynicism surrounding the first study’s results, this one found that couples who seemed to lack mutual friends were more eager sit together for endless marathons of Rick and Morty until they are mutual friends.

“Our findings showed that when people lack shared friends with their romantic partners, sharing media predicts greater relationship quality and people become motivated to share media with their partners,” Gomillion stated. “These studies show that shared media can enhance interdependence and allow people to compensate for lacking a shared social network in the real world.”

Own The Conversation

Ask The Big Question

So if things aren’t working, we should… make friends with fictional characters together?

Disrupt Your Feed

This sounds suspiciously like how junkie couples operate.

Drop This Fact

The most watched TV finale of all time was not Seinfeld nor even Cheers as some might suspect, but actually M*A*S*H. Yes, now that theme song is deep inside you, just as it was on that fateful night when Hawkeye and co. last said goodbye to any and all casual sexual innuendo pertaining to Hot Lips in front of some 105.9 million viewers in the US alone.